Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Eleven

In this instalment of The Climate Trials we find out that someone or some group is concerned about Mikhail's work and has even heard vague rumours about the Old Ones. But this seems to be something that they are able to deal with---.

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Interim Report on Mikhail Bookchin and The Climate Trials. Prepared by Panoptes International

Executive Summary

Our analysis of the audience response to the initial five episodes of The Climate Trials indicates that a significant and sophisticated campaign was mounted to spoof all the major social media search engines in order to drive viewership much higher than normal. Part of our analysis involved discovering an entirely unknown bot army that had been infected by a totally new and very powerful polymorphic virus. It seems to have a greater ability to influence a SERP score than anything we’ve seen before. The bot army was able to dramatically increase exposure on Twitter, Face Book, Instagram, Tick Tock, Pinterest, etc, to drive extremely impressive You Tube traffic.

We couldn’t find any evidence of this being the result of a state-based player, or even known organized crime groups. Instead, it appears that there is a new, totally unknown major player on the Web. Panoptes sent out web spiders to scrape the Dark Web for evidence of communications associated with this unknown campaign and was only able to find hints of an extremely sophisticated physical layer encryption network. The only information we were able to find was one specific phrase that was being used over and over again in many different languages:

• Africaans: “Oues”

• Arabic: “alqadima”

• Hindi: “puraana”

• Italian: “Quelli vecchi”

• Romanian: “Batranii”

• Turkish: “Eski olanlar”

• English: “Old Ones”

We couldn’t get beyond this one phrase and what it means we can’t even speculate.

At this point we have hit a wall and suggest that not much more can be done until we gain access to a specific machine that is being used to propagate this network. We recommend to the client that they engage a private detective contractor to work back from the actual visible face of the Climate Trials in order to find out exactly who the “Old Ones” might actually be. Given the sophistication and depth of security that is evident in their on-line presence, we would suggest using nothing but the most experienced agencies. We have added a list of suggested firms in appendix 2 of the complete report.

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Field notes for agent 12 of Oprix Investigations:

day 12 of file 2205:

I took over contact surveillance of subject 33 at 6:00am from agent 46. It appeared from thermal imaging cameras that subject was in bed asleep until 8:30am. For the next two hours normal morning activity---shower, breakfast, exercise (taijiquan), computer time (mostly reading news according to the the tap we installed on his modem.) Situation same routine, nothing to suggest involvement with any sort of larger organization.

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Mikhail had stopped for lunch at the restaurant that most of his friends called “the Appalling”, but at which he generally enjoyed eating. Just another greasy spoon. But the owners were pleasant, the food cheap, and, if he went at the right time there was generally lots of room to spread out and catch up on his reading. Besides, they always served a home-made soup with every meal. (Mikhail was a “soup” person instead of a “salad” type.)

This day something happened, though. In between the vegetable beef soup and the bacon/grilled cheese sandwich and fries, one of the guys that he’d met at the “Holy House” showed up and sat down in the table next to him. He asked Mikhi what was “good” and suggested that he act like he didn’t know him because he was being followed. He dropped a fork and when he bent over, he slipped a folded piece of paper into Mikhi’s boot. After that he didn’t say anything more, ordered a meal, and, stayed while Mikhi finished up, paid his bill, and, left the restaurant to walk home.

When he got home, he pulled out the paper. The first bit he saw told him to go to a windowless room and read the rest.

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Sorry to go all “cloak and dagger” on you, but the Elders have noticed you are under surveillance. It looks like something has been added to your computer---software probably, but perhaps hardware---allowing a third party to see everything you look at online, to read your unencrypted messages, etc. Also, someone is following you when you leave the house.

We don’t want you to change anything you’re doing, but one of our people is going to get into your home and install a device on your modem that will create a copy of your normal activity and then take over what the device sees when you are on line. You probably won’t know what happens, but we consider this a courtesy in case you find out and it concerns you. I’d suggest that you continue doing whatever you did before.

As for the physical surveillance, don’t even bother looking. We have other people who will be taking care of that side of things---.

We’ll be in touch later to give you some more detail.

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.